Adam Banks put together a Storify of the responses that show there are plenty of use cases for those not hard of hearing to get value from closed captioning.

In general, any context where either the audio track is loud enough that the viewer doesn’t want to disrupt those nearby, or the background noise is too much to hear the audio track clearly, is a case where captions have value for all users. Other cases that popped up include multi-tasking or working with a new language or just tough accents.

Update: November 14, 2013

It’s a neat proof-of-concept to show how real-time closed captioning is a possibility with current technology, albeit imprecise and cumbersome. If nothing else, hopefully it can bring more attention to a technique that, as demonstrated above, can benefit all users in everyday situations.

It’s such a nifty experiment, I am embedding it here (remember, this isn’t mine, this is Dave Rupert‘s code):

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